Anywhere My Walks Take Me

GREGOR MUIR How did A Line Made by Walking 1967, one of your earliest works, come about?

RICHARD LONG Well, I had this idea to make an artwork simply by walking a line, making a footpath going nowhere. I got on a train at Waterloo Station and watched the countryside go by. After half an hour or so, I spotted a convenient field. It was just a grass field. I can’t say any more than that. I wasn’t looking for anything particular, but as soon as I saw this field, I thought, this would be a good place to make this work. I got off at the next stop and walked back to the field and started walking the line.

GM Did you bring anything with you to help you make the work? It’s a very straight line…

RL Strangely enough, I made it by eye. It’s easy enough to do. You just align a couple of things by sight, keep them in line, and keep walking. One of the things I noticed when I was making it was the way its visibility depended only on how many times I walked up and down the line. So, I walked and walked, until the line was very visible, and that was enough. I had a primitive camera at the time, one that I bought in a high street shop, and I took two photographs with it. One looking down the line, and one from the side. Then I went home.

GM What first gave you the idea to turn walks into works of art?

RL The idea of walking as a medium gradually developed. So, the next work was a straight 10-mile walk across Exmoor, so the line in the field became a line on a map. Then, some years later, I made a geometric walk around central England, A Thousand Hours, A Thousand Miles 1974. So, time and distance became an important part of my art.

GM What goes through your head on these walks? Do you allow your mind to wander, or are you continually reminding yourself that you’re engaged in the act of making an artwork?

RL Each walk is about a different idea. For example, Cerne Abbas Walk 1975 was about walking in a place as opposed to walking from place to place. So, I am always thinking about my route. But of course, it’s also about real enjoyment. I love walking and camping – it’s all very physical. I’m just a natural-born artist who likes walking, so I have made it my art language. I mean, I’m not a conceptual artist, because every walk is real. That is very important. When I was a young artist in Bristol, I had this intuition that the world outside the studio – the world of landscape, rivers, trees, fields, beaches: the whole environment – was much more interesting and offered far more potential for me to be original as an artist.

GM Have there ever been times when a walk hasn’t worked out?

RL Oh yes. I once went to Scotland and it was just so wet with torrential rain and the rivers were so flooded that I was trapped by the amount of water in the landscape, and I had to abandon the walk. Quite often I find I have to be flexible and realistic, and open to change.

GM What draws you to natural objects, such as stones and mud, rather than more traditional forms of sculpture?

RL Growing up in Bristol, I was fascinated by the River Avon, and the big tide and the huge mud banks. Sometimes the river was full, and sometimes it was empty. I use stones because that is what the world is made of. It means that I can make my work in the many landscapes my walks take me. They are practical. I can pick up a stone in my hand, or carry a stone in my pocket, from day to day. They are ubiquitous. They are like the atoms of the world.

GM Let’s discuss Norfolk Flint Circle 1990, an astonishing work, and the centrepiece of your display currently at Tate Modern.

RL I just had this idea that it may be good to use flint, and then I looked around and found a flint quarry in Norfolk, so that was it. I made my first circle in 1966. It was intuitive, it just seemed like a good idea at the time. I realised from that first circle that it had a kind of power. It wasn’t necessary for me to make my own, idiosyncratic images. The sun and the moon are iconic, universal circles that humans have been looking at for as long as we have existed. So, I realised that a circle had power as well as beauty, and it could be identified by anyone, from anywhere. It has also carried many different ideas and materials for me.

GM I find it fascinating the way in which you become a vehicle for your work. You go into the world and capture it through a process of walking, looking, touching. You become almost a stylus on the landscape, moving through it, tracing it and transmitting it, so then we get to hear it.

RL Yes, exactly. All my work is about my own body – it’s all physical. I think of my work as a kind of measurement of myself in the landscape. The stones I can pick up, the time it takes me to walk continuously from Bristol Bridge to London Bridge… I’m a human measure.

GM In a work like Waterfall Line 2000, you seem to be engaging in a very physical recording of an action.

RL I made Waterfall Line with my hand, applying mud to the wall from a scaffold. I say that I make the top half of the work, while gravity and nature makes the bottom half, as the water runs down. Sometimes I make a water drawing in a landscape by pouring water down a rock face. I can just record it with a photograph, and then it disappears. But when I’m in a gallery, I need a slightly different process. I mix china clay with the water so it leaves a residue, a mark – so you can actually see it.

GM Tell me about the extraordinary images you’ve taken in Bolivia, the Himalayas and the Sahara. What do these photographs remind you of when you see them again?

RL These are works that I made on peaceful wilderness walks. They are stopping places along the way. The photographs simply remind me, and enable me to show you, what I have done in places sometimes thousands of miles away, and many years ago. I make these works out of the natural materials and features of each place, but I am not interested in making monuments or encouraging people to find them. That’s not the point. The line on the Khumbu Glacier in the Himalayas, for example, was made on a moraine – it started to break up almost as soon as I’d finished it. That was part of the work, and the photograph recalls the work at that particular moment. And then after that, it can go on its way, like me. So, I have a kind of freedom to be an artist at any time, anywhere my walks take me.

GM Your work seems to reinforce the idea of walking as a time-based medium.

RL Well, the whole world is made in time. Everything is in flux. Everything is in motion. That’s another reason why I’m not interested in making permanent works. Take Circle in Africa 1978 as another example. The story there is that I went up this mountain in Malawi with the idea to make a circle of stones. And when I arrived near the summit, I realised that, being in Africa, there was no ice or snow to break up the rock into stones. I had to go to plan B. There were regular lightning storms on the mountain, which would scorch the cacti. So that’s what I chose to work with – the burnt cacti that were lying around. As an artist, I go with the flow, I’m an opportunist. If nature offers me a better idea than the one I arrived with, I will take it.

GM You’ve worked in some extremely remote places and I’m sure you must have met some incredible people in the course of making your work.

RL Sometimes, I say that if I were a writer, I’d be writing anecdotal stories about the human interactions I’ve had on my travels. But my work as an artist is about images and places, not people. But obviously on these journeys, I’ve met many amazing people. For example, on a walk in the Himalayas with fellow artist Hamish Fulton in 1975, we were in a little Sherpa village having a coffee, when in walked Edmund Hillary who sat down at our table.

GM One of your framed text pieces, Ten Days Walking and Sleeping on Natural Ground 1986, features a list of Scottish hills and peaks, beginning and ending with Beinn a’Chait. Reading the names of the places you visited reminds us once again how time and space is embedded in your work, stacked in this instance; it is a journey from one place to the other, ending up where you started. Looking at your work in this display, what do you hope visitors will take from it?

RL Well, to see the beauty of water, of gravity, of stones, of particular landscapes and ideas. My work is not about popular culture, but I believe if ideas are original, they do find their way in the world. So, I think, without trying, in some places I go, people know about my work. It resonates, which is kind of magical.

^{ARTIST ROOMS: Richard Long, Tate Modern, until 4 October}

^{Richard Long is a sculptor who lives and works between London and Bristol.}

^{Gregor Muir is Director of Collection, Tate.}

^{ARTIST ROOMS presents the work of international artists in solo exhibitions drawn from a national touring collection jointly owned by Tate and National Galleries of Scotland. Its programme reaches audiences across the UK and is developed through local partnerships. The ARTIST ROOMS national collection and programme is managed in partnership by Tate and National Galleries of Scotland with the support of Art Fund, Henry Moore Foundation and using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England and Creative Scotland.}